Time is still- Part 1

Time is still. Breathing is harder. The days have become longer. 

What happens when you hear elephants singing? Or feeling the water on your skin so intensely you almost feel like an explosion will happen.

Have you ever really understood what happens when two stars collide? Or how money works? Or how two people find each other?

I have not.

Today I walked in the park pondering how little I understand. The multiplicity of greens as the sun goes down can never be captured by my camera. Those intense colours under the washed out orange sky remind me of how little we can describe the beauty of what we see and how we feel it around us.

Wondering how someone’s lips will feel on your skin. Thinking of how you can explain how you choose to make someone your family. Wondering what your father would have said if he was still around.

I imagine the day my father died begun like any other day. It must have been hot. June is usually hot on the island. Children must have gone to school. Parents to work.

I am not sure where I was. No one ever talks about it. I imagine I would have been with my grandmothers. Everyone including him knew that he would die. Apparently he asked for a kebab the day before. Apparently he also did not want to see me, so that I would not remember him in that way.

I still do not remember him. I search in my conscious, my unconscious, my subconscious but he is not there. I imagine he is buried underneath a lot of crap; waiting for me to find him again. As the years go by and life folds and unfolds I often sit back and think of him. The man who has defined my life by his absence. Who would I be if he was still around?

Last year I visited his family, my family, in the South of Greece looking for him. Looking for him in others’ memories of him, so that I could manage to fill the void of my own lack of memories of him.

A year later I sit in my bedroom, and I am still looking for him, wondering how I can begin to fill this void and understand him more. Thinking how I can retrace him and try and narrate his life which was so short in order to try and understand my own. I guess everyone has their story. I have come to realise that his is mine...